The things that excited me most about Banks’s book before I read it were its intriguing cover and the fact that both “race” and “technology” were in the title. I was looking for a book that discussed the intersection of these two usually separate discussions. While I was not disappointed in Banks’s treatment of both race (that is, African American rhetoric and experience) and technology, I had to work carefully in class to bring the book into conversation with the other voices we’d been considering in the course, voices like Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell, Kieth Gilyard, Derrick Bell, Catherine Prendergast, Charles Mills, David Theo Goldberg, and Michael Omi and Howard Winant.

Perhaps this is always an issue in composition theory courses that attempt to discuss race and racism, or race and technology, or racism and pedagogy. Students read of structural racism, of the ways our justice, education, government, entertainment, and other systems and social networks institutionalize practices and rhetoric that are either racist or produce racist effects, then the question eventually gets asked: So how does this apply to the classroom? Or now that I know this, how should it change the way I teach composition in my 101 class? Banks’s book, particularly the last chapter, attempts to address this very question, connecting the more theoretical and rhetorical discussions of his other chapters.

The most provocative sections of Banks’s book I highlight in this review (see “Teaching Points and Passages”), namely his theorizing of levels of access in chapter 2, the discussion of the technological aspects of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rhetorics in chapter 3, chapter 6’s discussion of African American quilting practices of the Underground Railroad and its potential for producing heuristics for a “rhetoric of design,” and his provocative section in chapter 7 on soul and its potential in arranging pedagogies that “search for higher ground” in the classroom. Banks is most intriguing when he asks us to redefine “access” to technology, ideas worth the attention of all teachers of writing since without access there’s no education. He is most convincing when he discusses African American rhetorics and rhetors, like X, King, and Southern quilt-makers, as archetypes that illustrate and help us explicate the possibilities of critical and transformative access to technology. These are archetypes worth a close examination in any composition course because they’re rhetorical practices that teach us about power, institutions, people, and the ways in which what we say is affected by how we say things and the ways in which those things are distributed to audiences.

Beyond these strengths, the book’s treatment of its subject left me with a few unfulfilled expectations, some of which probably stem from my own politics and not from a short-sightedness on Banks’s part. The book fell short for me in three important ways:

• It tended to construct “race” in binary terms.
• Its discussions begged for a fuller treatment of various communities of color.
• Additional critical theory would have strengthened the book's arguments.